Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

My father died in November of my senior year. As the pallbearers lowered him into the ground I watched Matka shrink into herself like a blooming flower in reverse, nothing but a bud afterward. My mother took a three-month-long holiday in Minnesota, where she drowned her anguish in the twenty-below chill with her sister, the “Midwestern harlot,” as my father had called her. Who knows what he would have thought of his wife hiding in a snowdrift town called Monserrat, drinking vodka out of the bottle and swaddled in fur. It was after Peter died, everyone said, that she lost her grip on her natural eccentricity; after all, what kind of mother would leave her son for three months after such a tragedy?

She came back at the end of winter. Her suitcase was gone, and so was the coat. She’d given both of them to Penelope, she said, who had barely anything. Gosh, you’ve never felt that kind of cold, she said. She was wearing a lot of makeup, but I could tell that she looked awful underneath. Her foundation didn’t quite match her sallow neck. Have I mentioned that my mother’s once-placid face, after my father’s death, now had a perpetually bewildered expression, as though to say, How did I wind up here? After she came back from Minnesota I was under the impression that she had become absorbed in the cold there, and that it was impossible for her to materialize fully as flesh and not frozen, fluffy water.

I am confident this is where the true sorrow — sorrow? I lack the correct word — began, when I learned that it is possible for I hurt, I hurt, I hurt, I hurt to be my only heartbeat. Puh-lum. Puh-lum. Of course, it seemed natural for me to grieve. Matka, after all, was grieving. My peers and teachers at school knew that Peter Nowak had died, and his son, David, who had just inherited the Nowak Piano Company not so long ago, surely must be grieving as well. Marianne, God bless her, particularly mothered me. She had a gift for not making me feel like a child even as she sat with my head in her lap, stroking my hair in silence.

All of this in hindsight seems ordinary. It was ordinary and then — when I realized I was mourning something more than my father — it turned into something monstrous. My despair sprang from an awareness that whatever I had suffered from before, whatever neuroses had been dormant for this brief period while my father slept and Marianne walked tall and golden by my side as my only companion, had returned. It was a feeling that eventually metamorphosed outside the realm of human emotion. This unnameable thing I eventually called “vitaphobia” as a feeble attempt to get at the nastiness that was neurosis turned inside out — the fear of everything else turned into the fear of actually being alive. In simplest terms, vitaphobia was the fear of the sun shining or not shining, of opening my eyes or keeping them closed, of eating or not eating, of eating too much or too little, of darkness and light, of all the colors and hues of the rainbow, of every texture that my body could touch. Everything that I could register caused paralyzing fear, and the only solution to this that I could think of was to be dead. I am trying to keep this from becoming maudlin as much as I’m compelled to just open the window and scream, or writhe around on the floor right now. I ask the Lord, Do you know what you’ve been asking of me for all of these years? But of course. And how can you ask me to continue? All those nights in the woods, praying, hoping for an answer I could use!

Yet I didn’t kill myself then. There was something keeping me alive that I’ve since lost: a pessimistic optimism. One frantic afternoon I tied a belt around my neck in my bedroom and yanked hard, but I choked for only a second before I pried the pathetic noose away from my throat and threw it across the room. I didn’t tell Marianne. In the worst of it, I wanted to protect her, which was my first adult instinct; but not telling someone that you’ve got vitaphobia is like telling someone that you’re not covered in blood when you are — it doesn’t work, and you look the worse for denying it. She came to my house and I could see the fear that slipped over her face like a mourning veil. I lay in bed and she prayed at the foot of it, usually the Memorare, over and over, but I slept through most of it, and even my sleep was painful and shallow. I dreamed of Matka. Where was she? When she spoke, hovering over my face, I smelled the faintly sweet burn of vodka on her breath, her teeth the color of piano keys. I conflated her and the Virgin Mary as she cradled my head in her lap. Eventually I was my old self again — though hardened and glossy, having gone through a crucible — and later, as an adult, the doctors would explain to me that this was the natural course of my illness; even unmedicated, there would be times when I was well and times when I was sick, but I didn’t know that for years, and I attributed my wellness or lack thereof to whatever seemed an appropriate precipitant, like the seasons, or, later, the ups and downs of my marriage, or a nasty encounter at the K & Bee Grocery. It wasn’t a spiritual illness, they explained to me. And what are your spiritual beliefs? I asked them in turn. One said he was uncomfortable disclosing such a thing to a patient. Another said he was Lutheran. There were a few more, but even the Catholic one didn’t put his hand on my shoulder and say, Go, then, to a priest, and have yourself exorcised.

“I did,” Marianne informed me toward the end of my senior year, “talk to Father Danuta. I said to him that you might be possessed. It was naive, of course, but he was kind. He listened to the things I said, and then he asked me some questions, like a doctor palpating a pain. He said that you were very sick, but that you weren’t possessed by the Devil, and that the Church performed very few exorcisms to begin with. Is it strange to say that I was—”

“Disappointed?”

“No, not that…” (But she was. At least a demon could be cast out.)

She finally said, “I was afraid for you. I didn’t know what to do for you but pray.”

Eventually I was functioning again, but what had happened to my mind left me hobbled, as if I’d been hit by a car instead, and with poor healing to show for it. I graduated with mediocre marks; I suspect I avoided failing entirely only because adults pitied me, couldn’t help me in any other way, were too embarrassed to offer a kind ear, and so raised my grades. Good for you, I thought as I stared down at some written exam of mine, too beaten down for truly enthusiastic sarcasm. At the top was written 70 .

And Mr. Pawlowski, my surrogate father now, squeezed me almost entirely out of any company matters, having me sign here and there on various dotted lines on papers I never read — not that I blamed him. What could he do, when I was the one who really owned everything, but could do almost nothing. Nothing, that is, but sell the company.

“If you’re going to sell, sell to George,” Matka said. “He knows what he’s doing.” But I still couldn’t forgive him for what he had said to me about Marianne, so I nodded and said, “Of course,” with no intention of following through; Matka would love me no matter what, though selling the company would give us both more than enough to live on for the rest of our lives.

There was a businessman from Maine who was interested in moving to New York. He was willing to keep the name intact, and offered $10 million for the factory and everything associated with the factory, including its workers and unsold pianos. I tried to get more because I was proud and hurt, which is a terrible combination for partaking in a business deal. He said, “Don’t you have an adult to handle these things for you?” I said, “Fuck you,” and hung up.